Re: if you weren 't born or raised a steeler fan, how did you become one ??

Born and bred in London, I had some cousins who lived up in Roaring Spring. They used to send me a ton of Steeler stuff when I was little, and had no idea what American football was. Of course I loved the helmet the most, butting folks and running into stuff and whatnot.
UK TV coverage of the sport was practically zero. There was an hour-long highlights show very late on Monday nights and when we finally got a VCR I got to watch that. Every week it was either Cowboys, 49ers or Redskins in the feature game, and all the Steelers I would get would be a 15 second round-up of us getting mashed by the Oilers or some such bunch of buttniks. That made it all the better to follow the Steelers because it made me a REAL fan of a REAL team.
This was in the early 80s and I had no real idea the Steelers had ever been any good.
Of course everyone else in Britain was a Cowboys, 49ers or Redskins fan, it seemed to me, and I felt it was cool and cache to support a minority team that nobody else followed.
Course, ever since, the coverage and support for American football here in the UK has grown, and the team has made me DAMN glad that my cousins lived where they did... As it happens, I'm a much bigger fan than those cousins are, and a couple of years ago I flew over and took them up to the Bengals game at Heinz.
It was a real emotional moment.